However, Plato has no prejudice against moderate wealth. His sermons are directed against excessive commercialism, which puts money before the human interest,[101] thereby causing injustice, degenerate luxury, vicious extremes of wealth and poverty, political graft, individual inefficiency, and wars both within and without the state. Though his philosophy leads to asceticism, and his attitude toward wealth seems, on the surface, to breathe this spirit, yet Plato is not an ascetic in his doctrine of wealth, as is often wrongly asserted. He describes the true attitude as that which partakes of both pleasures and pains, not shunning, but mastering them.[102] He recognizes an assured competency to be practically a prerequisite for the development of the good life,[103] while, on the other hand, he considers poverty to be an evil only second to excessive wealth.[104] To be sure, Plato’s demand for a limitation of private and national wealth, and his general negative attitude are, if interpreted rigidly, unfruitful and economically impossible.[105] It is not business that should be curbed, but bad business.[106] Individual or nation cannot become too prosperous, provided there is a proper distribution and a wise consumption of wealth, and Plato’s idea that great prosperity is incompatible with this goal can hardly be accepted by modern economists. Nevertheless, there is much of abiding truth in his doctrine of wealth. Aside from the profound moral value of his main contention, we may state summarily several points in which he remarkably anticipated the thought of the more modern humanitarian economists: (1) in the fact that excessive private wealth is practically impossible without corresponding extremes of poverty, and that such a condition is a most fruitful cause of dissension in any state; (2) in the fact that extremes of wealth or poverty cause industrial inefficiency; (3) in the prevalent belief that no man can gain great wealth by just acquisition, since, even though he may have done no conscious injustice, his excessive accumulation has been due to unjust social conditions; (4) in the growing belief that expenditures of great private fortunes are not likely to be helpful either to individual or to community, but are too liable to be marked by foolish luxury and waste that saps the vitality of the nation; to Plato, such are mere drone consumers of the store (τῶν ἑτοίμων ἀναλωτής, ... κηφήν);[107] in this, he was a forerunner of Ruskin, who opposed the old popular fallacy that the expenditures of the wealthy, of whatever nature, benefit the poor;[108] (5) in the dominant note in economic thought today, so emphasized by Plato and Ruskin, that the prime goal of the science is human life at its best—as Ruskin states it, “the producing as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures”;[109] (6) in the fact that the national demand for unlimited wealth is now recognized, as Plato taught, always